So when I saw the headline Ice Cold  A’s Hit for Loss again I immediately thought back to the mood in the Twins clubhouse when Minnesota traded away Luis Castillo last year.  The players believed it was a sign the organization didn’t care about winning, and that the team was in store for a lot of losing while GM Bill Smith rebuilt the team over the next couple of years. The players went into a terrible slump.  The tease for the  A’s story mentioned how the trade of Rich Harden and Joe Blanton in the past couple of weeks had seemed to affect the hitting.  What’s great about  Susan Slusser piece though is it doesn’t give you what you expect.  The A’s have been hit by injuries and have little offensive threat in their line-up.  The rash of injuries made the trades more necessary for the A’s so the timing is cause and effect as it is cause and cause.  What Slusser does in this article though is debunk the notion that the A’s have given up by talking with Frank Thomas, one of the injured and the major offensive threat that is missing from the batting order.  And Thomas’s answer is great. From Slusser’s article:

Thomas “hasn’t seen any indications that players are upset that Harden and Blanton were dealt away while the team was above .500 and within striking distance of the wild-card spot.

“Most of our guys are so young, they wouldn’t think about that, and the older guys know what’s going on,” Thomas said of the A’s continued rebuilding efforts. “I haven’t seen any drop in attitude. And we’ve still got time to make a run. We’re nine back. The Mets were 7 1/2 games back last month and now they’re tied. We get some confidence, put a winning streak together, and we’re right back in it.”

The other side to consider is how much the A’s have changed over the years.   Whereas the Twins remained mostly the same team, many even playing together through the minors, the A’s undergo regular change every few months.  That’s business as usual in that clubhouse, so trading away some solid players is not an indication to these guys that management has given up.

On a related note, I think the A’s the last couple of seasons have shown another reason why moneyball, or at least moneyball as it is being executed doesn’t actually work.  The real theory behind Billy Beane’s strategy in Michael Lewis’ Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game is that a team with a smaller budget has to look for value in places that other teams aren’t looking.  The last two years, Beane has found that value in taking on riskier players, ones that, like Frank Thomas, have some health issues that make them dangerous to sign for the price that they should command.  He basically has taken on other teams health risks, and unfortunately, they are health risks for a reason, and so they spend time on the Disabled list.  Now if you are a big market team like, say the Mets, you can sign a player like Pedro Martinez or Moises Alou to a contract, with the expectation that they will only play a portion of that contract.  Pedro was signed for 4 years, and mostly likely the team thought they would end up getting 2.5, which is about what they will get.  Alou though probably expected to play 85 games this year has left them in a bit of a pickle, but still they will find the money to fix that one too.  The A’s have to take a Frank Thomas or a Mike Sweeney and hope they get 140+ games from them and if they don’t then their back-up plan isn’t strong.  Sure, this year Thomas was found money, as he is being paid by Toronto, really, but Sweeney, well, even for as little as he is getting, seems to be money not very well spent.  in looking at OBP and OPS, Beane revolutionized the game, with some thanks to Bill James, but now his new trick has been co-opted by many other teams, and his ability to find value is fading.  Anyone want to bet that Carlos Delgado is an Athletic next year?

No one got all four MVP’s from yesterday, though quite a few tried to tell me the question was flawed.  There are four players, three besides Robin Yount who won an MVP at two positions.  Two did it before Yount, and one has done it since and is still playing.  One more hint.  Of the two that did it before Yount, one did it for an AL team, the other did it for an NL team.  I’m letting this question ride one more day to see if we can get a winner.